The work is inspired by Chris Kraus’ novel “I love Dick”. I used Kraus’ words mixed with some personal reflections on the topic of relationships. The interest is to analyze the gap between what society drives us to desire and the true desire of the Other, and how to cope with this desire when we can’t satisfy it.
Mass culture has transformed romantic love into one of the most pervasive mythologies of contemporary life, associating it with personal happiness. Kraus uses lonely desire as a philosophy because “emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form”.
We live in a society that glorify hetero-monogamous relationships as a supreme value presenting them as a necessary component of happiness and as the only way to be a full person, but this form of so-called “romantic love” helps to maintain the control of the masses in contemporary society by establishing basis for marriage and reproduction and by reinforcing the concepts of individualism and the separation of genders.
This is not to say it’s a work against love, but it’s against the idea of becoming dependent on another human being that we cannot function adequately without their presence. This is a work about discovering the true meaning of desire, passion, love and intimacy as something that is inherently ours and not something that has to fit into a series of
stereotypes.
Miriam Poletti lives and works in Milan, Italy. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan with a degree in Visual Arts. Her research focuses on the topics of identity, feminism, intimacy and vulnerability. In her projects, both url and irl, the body is the main instrument to investigate the world.
